ABSTRACT
Drawing on long-term ethnographic work with artists, filmmakers, and humanitarians living and working in Nairobi, Kenya, this chapter explores the material underpinnings of discursive cultural practices in their constitution of the crisis of terror. It begins by looking closely at the production of the feature film Wazi?FM. The film, which tells the story of the xenophobia that faces Nairobi's Somali refugee population, had its production interrupted by one of Nairobi's more violent terror attacks: the four-day militant siege of Westgate mall by Somali-based Al Shabaab, just blocks from the film's production studio. Looking at this entanglement of humanitarian filmmaking and an act of ‘local’ violence, we can trace a discursive collapse within the film's production, in which the key referents that structured the film's reflective, realist narrative logic started to fall apart. What drove this moment of discursive disruption was that the film's producers – themselves mostly Europeans who experienced topics of destruction and human despair with a professional distance – were suddenly propelled into the chaotic mix along with their ‘subject matter’. Feelings of personal risk, vulnerability, and fear suddenly become a central part of discussions about how to make a film about Somalis living in Nairobi. Elaborating on Peter Sloterdijk's notion of ‘environments’ of terror, this chapter explores the entangled affective intimacies between cultural producers – myself included – and acts of primary aggression in urban East Africa. Presenting a detailed ethnographic description of cultural production in a time of terror, this chapter explores how we can rethink the constitution of terror in its affective character, and some ways that worldly qualities like emotional experience and proximity to death relate back to our experiences and representations of contemporary, transnational politics of fear.
